Monthly Archives: March 2011

Knowing full well that I have a wedding this weekend I was planning on borrowing a dress from a girlfriend. I was also going to pack earlier this week so I didn’t have to jam it all in on Thursday night. But alas, plans change.

All week I came home from work, put on pajamas and settled in front of the television. (Hey, it’s been a long week with the unexplained stomach pains and not feeling my regular, perky self.) So of course, plans to borrow a dress from said friend kept getting pushed and pushed.

Because last night was the last possible night before leaving for the weekend, I had to revisit the plan and instead borrow from other friends who live closer…and now in merely one night of popping around town picking up dresses, I now have a whopping five dresses to choose from. I eliminated one already (too summery for this weekend’s winter weather) but I have no issues with packing four dresses. I mean, it’s not like I need to bring four pairs of shoes…two will suit me fine. The boyfriend seemed to have a slight issue with bringing four dresses. It’s not like we are bringing extra luggage…we’ve got the room, and I am a light packer so it’s really not an issue.

This is not a matter of procrastination. Like the title of this post, it’s just plans gone astray. I should have had the dress in my closet a week ago. I also should have started packing before last night. It’s just a weekend but still packing the night before, even for the most organized of packers (yes, me!) is just my thing. I like to pack a little and start getting through my list, throughout the week. At least I had the list written.

And finally, I would just like to clarify that packing of four dresses is not indecision. I have so many options now that it’s going to be a game time decision.

At work, I sit in an open plan with about 100 people. I happen to sit very close to a color printer, which I NEVER EVER use. When it jams or needs a new color cartridge, WHY do people that need help assume I know how to fix it, or where the cartridges are even housed? Just because I sit nearby? Truthfully, I have no idea how to fix it and besides, printer problems confuse me.

If I happen to know there’s a jammed printer around, I just won’t print. (Come on, you know you do it too.) And Sherlock, there are about 10 cabinets close to the printer so I’d deduce that the color cartridges might just be living in one of them. Happy hunting.

Judging from the title of this post, you would have thought I got in a fight. I look and feel it but thats’ just not so.

Four days after my ER experience and I now look like a battered woman on both of my arms. The nurse’s needle work from taking my blood and inserting an IV have caused my arms to look like I got beat up. Like seriously black and blue. And! Oh this is great, I have a wedding on Saturday.

Will need to find some fantastic makeup to cover these bruises up. Oh, what’s that you say? Go into my makeup and find the best cover up? Oh that’s funny. I am probably the only 30 something year old woman whose makeup supply is barely non-existent. Mascara, eye cover up that doesn’t work on plain old eye circles, a couple of lipsticks and an eyeshadow palatte is not going to cut it for these bruises. That will be a fun trip to explain why my arms look the way they do when seeking professional guidance.

And to sweeten the pot, just as I was about to walk out the door for the first of several doctor’s follow up appointments yesterday, I went to wipe off my glasses lenses, and wouldn’t you know it…they snapped in half. The timing is impeccable. Thankfully I already have a prescription for lenses and I did buy frames while in Argentina, so today I had the pleasure of figuring out my vision benefits and where I can get my lenses made. Now I just need to take care of that, oh ASAP, since I can’t see without contacts or glasses. As an added bonus, I have very dry eyes, so I like to take my contacts out as soon as I get home, so I really need to fill that prescription quickly — otherwise, no TV this week.

What also sucks is that I sleep in those frames and they had yet to break. Furthermore, I have had those frames for years, and they were going to be my backup pair for times like these. And that plan went haywire.

I know in the scheme of things, this is hardly a crisis. I think it’s G-D’s way of making me laugh.

I have unexplained pain
Does it mean that it will rain
Poked and prodded with more than one test
I need to know what’s wrong, alas I cannot protest
There’s been no one to explain
I wish my medicine was champagne.

The boyfriend gets upset sometimes because I don’t really like to sit and watch movies. Call it bad movies, call it ADD but I just can’t sit still. Until this weekend.

Sunday movie day! In fact, there were so many good movies on, I had to keep switching channels and/or recording others. Let me make it clear that my idea of good movies is hell for my boyfriend. There was My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill, Serendipity, Miss Congeniality and I stumbled upon a Sex and the City marathon. Even though I saw every one of these movies and shows countless times, I still managed to spend precious hours on the couch on Sunday.

While I am typically not good at naming movie quotes, I now know it is because I am never asked to quote these kinds of movies. Clearly pop culture never picked up these references and put them into Trivial Pursuit, or bar trivia nights, but it is these references I am good at because I was able to say the line (or close to it) before it happened, detailing the scene before it started.

Movie watching, and small portions of mint chocolate chip ice cream, is part of the recovery process from my trip to the ER on Friday. I did step onto the balcony for a hot five minutes early this morning for fresh air and took a short walk later in the afternoon to fend off stir craziness. Thank you, ridiculous cold spell at the end of March for making my weekend indoors, and mostly on the couch, perfectly acceptable.

Please don’t think I was a complete waste this weekend (even though I am allowed to be). In addition to watching television and sleeping, I showered, did laundry and even managed to clean the floors in the bathroom AND kitchen. Apartment living has its perks – there’s only one bathroom and a small kitchen 😉

I cannot remember the last time I had a weekend this lazy. But for the record, I’m okay to not have another for a long while.

Spent the day yesterday in the ER. Wouldn’t recommend. But when your regular doctor tells you to go to the ER and to not pass go or collect $200, you don’t really have any other options.

A couple of observations:

1. The ER is NOT like Grey’s Anatomy. My doctor was very nice, smart and calming but he was no McDreamy, McSteamy or Sam, Pete or Cooper (if you watch Private Practice) by any stretch of the imagination.

2. My nurse was very nice too. But, she needed two tries to get the IV in my arm and now I have a huge welt where she got it in on the second try. Then, the first amount of blood she took wasn’t enough and the lab needed more. Yay – jabbed twice for that too. Shouldn’t it be one and done?

3. It doesn’t look all that clean. There was a big stain on the sheet of the bed (clean sheet, old stain – still gross), a hair on the floor of my ‘room’ – ew – and shoe scuff marks on the walls (how? why?)

4. It’s not all that sanitary. Both the doctor and the nurse had gloves on at one point, and both left the ‘sanitary’ confines of my ‘room’ and then came back – the nurse to take blood, the doctor to examine me. What did they touch outside the room before touching me? When I asked the doctor if he was going to put on new gloves he told me this is not a sterile environment. Um, it’s a hospital, shouldn’t it be a sterile environment?

5. Germs everywhere (realizing that this not a sterile environment). The woman in the ‘room’ across from mine was diagnosed with mono. We had the same doctor. What’s to say I didn’t pick up mono in the hospital? When I asked the doctor about that, he brushed it off and asked if I came into contact with her. Hello? He did! He was in contact with her, and me. Shouldn’t she be in a room with a sealed door, not just a curtain dividing her from the hallway! And if I am really going to go nuts, shouldn’t she have a completely different medical team that is dressed in space suits so none of us get any of her germs?

6. I have never just walked into an ER before, as a patient, alone. I have typically traveled by ambulance and I am usually in some sort of shock. Going in as a walk-in, you can see it’s really quite efficient. Before I was done registering, I was already being called into triage. Got out of triage and settled into the waiting area, no more than 2 minutes later, I was called in for more insurance stuff and before we were done I was called to my ‘room.’ Then I waited – but not too long because…

7. The nurse was in within minutes, and the doctor was in pretty soon after that, which is nerve-wracking because you never want to be the worst one in the ER.

8. I am really funny when I am scared. Cracking jokes with the nurse, with the guys wheeling me around to various tests and even with the doctor. Scare the shit out of me and I am a regular stand-up comedienne.

9. When they make you drink a lot of liquids for tests, of course you are going to have long pees (is that a word?). The toilet is set to automatically flush like 10 seconds after you sit down. Really? Someone should reset that flush setting if they are going to make you drink a gallon of liquid.

10. The lab techs must be good poker players because every single tech I encountered didn’t reveal anything on their faces. ‘Wait for the doctor’ they say. For one of the tests there were students in the room. I couldn’t get anything from their faces either. That must be one of the first things they learn…don’t show anything on your face so the patient can freak out waiting for answers just a little longer.

11. Assuming the worst, and being in a room alone, gets the mind thinking. So I came up with a list of 25 (or so) questions for the doctor. Because the worst didn’t happen, I only got to ask 3.

12. Daytime TV seriously sucks.

13. There is no volume control on the remote. The only volume available was far too loud. I could hear the program on the TV in the ‘room’ next door without even having my volume on. This must be so annoying for the staff when it’s a full ER.

In the past few days, I have received business emails from several different emails that included the following text…

“You should of received…” and… “Do to some scheduling…” and “We’re glad your happy.”

This makes my skin crawl. While I am not the grammar queen, I still like to speak and write proper English.

While I am the kind of person that circles typos in take out menus (yes, I really do this), should I have to be doing that on work emails as well? It doesn’t annoy me so much on a text message or on quick email exchanges back and forth between friends, but a professional email? Come ON!

It probably stems from the fact that while growing up my mom would make me reword my sentences if they weren’t proper grammar – in mid-conversation!

ME: “Mom, I want to blah blah blah.”

MOM: “What?”

ME: “You heard me, I want to blah blah blah.”

MOM: “What?”

By the second time I usually understood what she was doing and I would have to rephrase my sentence.

This happened growing up, but she’s been known to still do it every now and then. In fact, sometimes she sends me notes on my sentence structure on a few blog posts. It’s like I have a proofreader at the ready.

sidenote: I was going to make the subject of this blog post “You’re Grammar Sux” but the incorrect use of ‘you’re’ when it should be ‘your’ along with the short hand ‘sux’ irked me so much that I had to change it to proper English before I hit the publish button.